2/25/13 10:00 AM EST

STATE OF PLAY -- We're a little less than four full days from sequestration taking effect, and there's absolutely no sign of any movement toward a deal to stop that from happening. It's all about posturing. So far as we know, none of the players are talking to each other. Over the weekend, Bob Woodward, who wrote the debt-limit deal book "The Price of Politics," called out President Barack Obama and top aides for painting a misleading picture about their involvement in creating this sequester process. Forget who came up with the idea, Democrats say, focus on the fact that Republicans don't want to stop it. Of course, the White House isn't even talking to the people who could change course — only people who don't have votes in Congress.

-- What all this reveals is that for all of the last 18 months of talk about how these cuts were never meant to happen — how they were so destructive that the country couldn't bear it — the top government officials either don't believe that or they hold each other in such contempt that they'd rather risk the health of the nation than talk it out. OK, maybe it's both.

-- The Senate is expected to consider a bill this week that would replace the across-the-board sequestration cuts with a $110 billion mix of targeted spending reductions and tax increases. But it's not yet clear how Reid would get the votes necessary to pass such a bill. House Republican leaders have shown no interest in considering new legislation to avert sequestration but point to two bills passed last year that the Senate never took up as evidence of where they stand.

WHY THEY CALL IT THE BULLY PULPIT — The top story across the country today is a set of memos, state by state, outlining how many cops and teachers could lose their jobs and who else would be affected by sequestration going into effect (Washington Post interactive guide: http://politi.co/XSGIuL). The White House released the memos yesterday with an 8 p.m. embargo, ensuring a full day's news coverage leading right into the Monday nightly newscasts.

DON'T BELIEVE THE HEADLINES? HERE'S THE STORY JOHN BOEHNER'S CONSTITUENTS WOKE UP TO -- The Cincinnati Enquirer, time stamp 1:46 a.m., took an "in-depth" look at the local effect of the cuts. "[I]n Ohio, everyone from Gov. John Kasich’s budget gurus, to General Electric Aviation’s engineers, to advocates for the poor are bracing for the worst, coping with the uncertainty, and waiting for the final word from Washington," Dierdre Shesgreen writes for the biggest paper in Speaker John Boehner's home region. "'This would probably bring us to our knees,' said Dr. Thomas Boat, dean of the University’s College of Medicine and vice president for health affairs. He was referring to a possible 8 percent cut in federal research grants, which support everything from clinical trials to the development of new drugs." http://politi.co/XSAB9C

BUT SEQUESTER WATCH, WILL IT MATTER? -- No. At least not before Friday.

THE ROGERS REPORT: DOUBLE TROUBLE -- "Discretionary spending is slated to fall below 2008 levels for the first time in Obama’s tenure, even allowing for the recent Hurricane Sandy emergency aid bill. When adjusted for inflation, POLITICO’s calculations show that Obama will have billions less than former President George W. Bush in nondefense appropriations — so important to his second-term agenda," David Rogers reports for POLITICO. "Post sequester, it’s now estimated that Obama will be left with total discretionary funding of $1.139 trillion, or 10 percent less in real dollars than his Republican predecessor. ... Until Friday, the precise percentage cuts won’t be known for sure. But about $70 billion in 2013 budget authority would be wiped out with defense expected to face a 7.7 percent reduction and nondefense about 5.2 percent. Those numbers might seem manageable, but agencies will be halfway through the fiscal year, meaning the true cuts are almost double what they seem." http://politi.co/XSMrk4

GOOD MONDAY MORNING, and welcome to the third edition of Sequester Watch, where sequestration is still in full, unobstructed view, it is noted that Argo, which was arguably the second best film about a covert operation in 2012, won the Oscar for Best Picture, it's been 443 years since Queen Elizabeth I was excommunicated from the Catholic Church, and Rashida Jones, whom I once unsuccessfully tried to speak to at a Harvard party (I was just visiting, not attending), is wished a happy 37th birthday.

Please send tips, comments, corrections, cash, and sports scores (like 2, the number of times Jimmie Johnson has now won the Daytona 500 after finishing first yesterday) to jallen@politico.com. If you don't already, please follow me on Twitter @jonallendc and @POLITICOPro. New followers include but are not limited to @rebeccateitel and @drninashah.

WHO POTUS IS TALKING TO: THE GOVERNORS -- The president, the vice president and their wives deliver remarks to the National Governors Association around 11 a.m. in the State Dining Room at the White House.

LOOK WHO'S TALKING, TOO: GOP GOVERNORS TO THE HILL -- Republican state execs are telling the president and Congress to come to the table, reports POLITICO's David Nather. "Their message for House Speaker John Boehner and other GOP leaders: It’s not OK to just sit on the sidelines. It’s time to do something to stop the automatic cuts, and fast. 'They need to stop having press conferences and start meeting,' Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell told POLITICO Sunday, referring to both Hill Republicans and Obama. 'The time for shows is over. We’ve had 18 months,'" David writes. "Other governors were even harsher. 'I think there’s a lack of leadership, period. And there’s enough lack of leadership blame to go around,' [Utah Gov. Gary] Herbert said Sunday. 'The president needs to step up with his proposals. Speaker Boehner needs to come to the table with his proposals. And what’s happening with [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid? I mean, they haven’t done a budget there for four years.'" http://politi.co/XSBMGm

LOOK WHO'S TALKING NOW: EVERYONE AT THE SAME TIME -- "The Republicans’ message on the sequester couldn’t be clearer: They don’t have a unified one," Ginger Gibson writes for the hometown paper. "There seem to be three distinct camps: Most congressional Republicans appear willing to let the sequester happen since they can’t replace it in time. Others want the cuts to be even deeper. And still others wish that House Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama would just get in the same room and negotiate a deal, even if it includes the tax hikes that most Republicans abhor." http://politi.co/XSCtzj

HITTING THE MARKELL: GOV. SNEAKS SEQUESTER LINE INTO TOAST -- In honoring the president with a rhyming toast at last night's NGA gala, Delaware Gov. Jack Markell proved that sequestration can be poetic. "One thing for sure is certain — you don’t let issues fester," Markell said. "You get to deal with education and health care, and even the sequester."

SUNDAY WRAP SHEET: THE TALKING HEADS -- Paul West of the L.A. Times has a tidy wrap-up of what folks said about sequestration on the Sunday shows yesterday. "Democrats fanned out on the TV talk shows with renewed warnings of severe economic damage from spending cuts due to begin on Friday. Republicans, meantime, maintained that the president needs to show more leadership in breaking the deadlock. 'I won’t put all the blame on the president of the United States, but the president leads,' [Sen. John] McCain, who lost the 2008 election to Obama, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” 'The president should be calling us over somewhere — Camp David, the White House, somewhere — and sitting us down and trying to avert these cuts,'" West writes. "Education Secretary Arne Duncan said that as many as 40,000 teachers could lose their jobs and that 70,000 children could be cut from Head Start programs because of the reduction in federal education aid to the states. As local school districts begin planning for next year, he said on CBS, 'There are literally teachers now who are getting pink slips, who are getting notices that they can’t come back this fall.'" http://politi.co/V0Bdvt

POST APOCALYPSE: WOODWARD vs. KLEIN — The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Ezra Klein went at it this weekend in dueling columns, placing blame, respectively, on the president and Republicans in Congress for creating this round of sequestration.

-- Woodward, no stranger to identifying White House misstatements, says President Obama is "moving the goalposts" by agreeing to a deal in 2011 that put sequestration into effect as a series of spending cuts and then asking for a mix of cuts and revenue to replace it. "His call for a balanced approach is reasonable, and he makes a strong case that those in the top income brackets could and should pay more. But that was not the deal he made," writes Woodward, who is author of a book about the deal called "The Price of Politics." Woodward says Obama and his aides poisoned the well on Capitol Hill with "months of White House dissembling" on the question of who came up with sequestration. Team Obama said it was Republicans, when, in fact, it was the White House that came up with the mechanism. http://politi.co/ZzyRpT

-- But Klein says Woodward can't see the forest for the trees. "'Moving the goal posts' isn’t a concept that actually makes any sense in the context of replacing the sequester. The whole point of the policy was to buy time until someone, somehow, moved the goalposts such that the sequester could be replaced," Klein writes. "The sequester was a punt. The point was to give both sides a face-saving way to raise the debt ceiling even though the tax issue was stopping them from agreeing to a deficit deal. The hope was that sometime between the day the sequester was signed into law (Aug. 2, 2011) and the day it was set to go into effect (Jan. 1, 2013), something would…change." The dynamic that shifted, Klein writes, is the 2012 election, in which Obama and congressional Democrats won. http://politi.co/XSSMMC

WHY THEY'RE BOTH RIGHT — The president and his aides, including Chief of Staff Jack Lew, said numerous times for many months that "Congress" — meaning Republicans — proposed sequestration. As Woodward reported in detail in his book, that's malarkey. What would be more accurate to say, but harder to explain to the public, is that the White House came up with sequestration as a means to accomplish what Republicans wanted in exchange for raising the debt ceiling: Big long-term spending cuts that couldn't just be ignored by future Congresses. So, the White House set up a way for the spending cuts to happen automatically without congressional action. They even made sure there was relatively even pain for the Pentagon and domestic programs. That, the president and lawmakers have said, was intended to be so awful that it would force Congress to make tough choices. Ha!

-- So, Woodward is right that the White House made an absurd argument to the public to build support for its view — an argument it has since backed away from, as he pointed out. But Klein is right that the idea was to buy time and come up with a new deal.

FRIDAY'S TRIVIA -- Congratulations to Ryan Cooperman of the Financial Services Institute for being the first to correctly answer that Sen. Jon Tester's name rhymes with sequester.

TODAY'S TRIVIA -- Reminder: The answer rhymes with sequester. Name the current NFL player whose college nickname was "Anytime," a play on Deion Sanders's "Prime Time" moniker. The first correct answer sent to jallen@politico.com wins the sender a mention in tomorrow's Sequester Watch.